Truetalk has been writing since he was a teen, and only in the last five or so years has he taken himself seriously as a writer. He lives in the Vancouver area of BC, Canada, where he has lived for most of his life. He finished his degree in psychology at Simon Fraser University in ’95 when he started his counseling practice for individuals and couples. He recently completed his PhD in psychology and philosophy at University of Life in Black Rock City. His counseling practice though broad in a practical sense, is specialized in alternative relationships, including the various forms of polyamoury, polyfidelity, or what ever other poly-like relationship you may be working on. He has studied the human psyche for almost his entire life, and has a thorough understanding of consciousness, human psychology, and our current social structure and how we as individuals or groups function and dysfunction within our culture and general social milieu. He would love to hear any feedback from the readers of this community, answer questions or even take requests or topics to write about.
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Exploring awareness
When I try to tell people about my relationships status, and say that I am a single-poly man, I mostly get, "huh, what does that mean?" Well, unless we have an hour or two, the words I share with you then and there will not describe to you all that I am starting to understand about who I am and how I love others. This will be a written account of what it means to me to be polyamorous.
As I poured myself a hot cup of coffee, I started to think of you. I am glad I did not continue last night. I was starting to feel a bit intense towards doubt and loneliness. There is no need for this though, and today I see my life in a different light. I love how easy it is to shift perceptions. I don’t fear these other feelings where I am uncertain about myself, pain is its result and that is all that is important. Because the next day though I see it there, the pain, I also see this other feeling of joy, happiness, excited eagerness at knowing I am on a path that is full, spontaneous, and unusual. I see multiple levels to describe my experiences. There are a clustering of perceptions coming together here in my head, together they create an image, but there is no name for it. Not only because I don’t like to use labels, but there is hardly anything like this out there to have been named. There are a few communities experimenting and consciously trying various forms of what I am going to describe for myself and you now.
I am a very sensitive man. Sensitive to emotions, feelings, even thoughts (especially in the written form). I can feel these non-physical energies flowing through my body and mind. I do not resist them much either. I am affected by their presence. There is (usually) a harmony between what is happening in my life and the feelings I am sensing. I say that obvious thing as an observance of the fact that there are moments when the waves of emotion coming at me are not mine, they are external, other, or incongruent with what I think or wish I was feelings. This is a perception of mine, and I understand that its foundation or reality is not based upon the noumenon around me. Thus, most of the time I feel what I feel and they are expected, comfortable, and I experience a harmony in my life, but once in a while, there is a feeling I have that does not seem to fit, I am confused and inner-conflict is my experience, and I perceive the phenomena of my life. The point here is that I am full of feeling, I have intense emotional experiences, and they move all over the whole spectrum of emotions we can experience.
I know you understand, you who are reading this, and I am thankful that I do not have to do this alone. In a way this whole letter is to create affirmation for my own intense and complicated life. I am aware now that I am taking on some kind of evolutionary, deep change. From the writings of ken Wilber, I see that my consciousness is making that quantum leap into a new orbit or vibration of energy. Change is hard for the best of us, and this kind of change can not be compared, it is a transformation of self and persona that will represent in my history that place in life where I was transformed and taken to a new experience of life. Perceptions are being modified, understanding is being expanded, awareness is being broadened, and love is being deepened. I am very excited about where this is going for me, and being able to write about it is actually a part of where I am going, yeah!
That was one, and the first perception that is meeting here in my centre of awareness, which is actually another perception. My awareness is changing, my understanding is changing, and life is taking on new meaning. I see how my attention creates my reality, and as I focus and illuminate my own intentions, my will and what can be called destiny, then it comes into my reality-- you manifest what you create in your own mind. This is not just happy new age speak, this is some kind of proven and documented phenomena. I have read books (for instance, The Breakthrough Experience), seen movies and documentaries (like, What the Beep do we Know) about this newly understood fact.
The thing is that this awareness in myself gives me a whole new set of powers and abilities in my life. As I explore this thought in my mind, I see that this is a tangent of thought, and though I want to mention it, I will not be able to fully talk about it here, it is way too deep and far reaching to be fully explored here. There is a growing non-physical ground of experience where people and groups will struggle for existence and position for power or stability. It is a hard thing to describe, because it is so new. I will do the best I can here by describing a metaphor and an analogy. In our history, we have on a very physical level fought and struggled for control of land and possessions. Such groups as pirates, military groups and political powers have struggled and fought violently for things such as land and property (even church as been involved in this struggle for power). We are done with this now, the earth is full, the people have found their place, and it is starting to stabilize and solidify as order and understanding among people.
On a non-physical level --psychic level-- there is a growing awareness of its presence as a real area to be, and that there are things to have there (or here). I can see how people are now battling, or struggling for power and possession on this psychic realm. Not mind so much either, that is what is being used in these struggles, but the entire realm of emotion and feeling and experience on a non-physical realm is opening up such that we are living in a new realm. As we discover this place to live, we are repeating our earlier behaviors and fighting, hurting, and causing pain for personal gain, power and ability. It is not a happy thought on one level, but on another it is reality, we grew in power and awareness on a physical level because of our aggressive natures. We never did just sit back and watch and see were we would live, we moved and took what we thought was ours. When the physical reality we came up against tried to stop us, or made our struggle difficult, we looked at it deeply and learned how to change it, overcome it and conquer it. So with our psychic existence, we are just starting though, and many people still don’t even have any awareness that this is a real place. It is hard to describe, because it is not a physical place, but there is energy there, and where there is energy there is existence, so the analogy is all we have, do you see it?
Lets keep moving along though, back to what is going on in me. Next I will introduce this love I have and feel and want. I will first, in relation to that last paragraph, say that love is the solution to the violence of our past. Briefly now, love is the power of creation and beauty and joy, with this ability fully opened up and utilized to its fullest abilities, it will indeed be a formidable force in the new psychic realm of our lives.
I am starting to see more clearly that our love is truly controlled. We keep it at bay to such a level of control that we are distorting its nature, we are contorting the beauty of love making it look dangerous and painful. This is all the result of our trying to control love, trying to block it from occurring in areas of our lives where we have been taught that it is not necessary or even good to love openly. Look at the different areas of society and your life in relation to the way you love, see how each area where you can love is controlled and you are told how to love. At work you love a certain way, in the family you love in a different way, then in marriage or intimate relationships we are told to love a certain different way again, friends too get “this” love only and not “those”, then all the way down to strangers and acquaintances also receive small doses of love. All of this control, I am thinking, is the source of the pain and misery we experience on a life long basis. Control has been used in our past to create a sense of togetherness and harmony among groups of people, and the consequence of this control is the creation of others, and those who do not fit in. It creates discord and separation from each other on a personal level and the social level. We are by nature, so it seems from our own history, a controlling being. I see it now on an individual level all over the place, people who have psychological and personal troubles because they are trying so hard to control too much of their lives. The need to control comes from the feeling of weakness that our hard and dangerous environment surrounds us with.
Awareness touches on so many different parts of perception. I am being pulled in two direction here as the author of this letter, one wants to continue to talk about the power of love, while the other wants to point out the effects our controlling pasts are having upon our foraging into the new realm of the psychic. Let us stay focused here. I am seeing that other topic as some kind of tangent, divergence from the main topic here: love. I suggest that we all, and if you can not, fine, but I will now open myself up to all manifestations, possibilities, and places for love in my life. I am full of fear, and I am uncertain but excited about this prospect of loving freely. Loving without boundaries beyond the person or moment I am with, without constraints set by my history, but set by the situation and the people being loved and loving. I am looking forward to taking in the energy that was used in controlling how I love and seeing where that energy will go, how will I feel stronger, more energized as I let go of these barriers of love that exists in all facets of my life. Also, how will others respond to my being as I open up my heart chakra. These things are all unknowns, and it is why there is fear and uncertainty, but that is not anything to stop this bold and new path for myself about how and who and where and why I love.
Which brings me to the next perception in this awareness of mine: I am a single man. This is but a perception though, because what is a single man when this man loves so openly and freely. I love each and all as equally as they will allow me to love them. I said to a friend last night, that a part of this growing in love is not how difficult it might be to open up to loving more, but the fact that it is not received with the same open heart that is sending it out. Others do not so much want to feel the love of a human who has no boundaries, when they still do have these walls and protections so that love will not hurt them or cause them pain again. Being the sensitive man, I see these reactions, they often feel rude to me, or blatant-- like real walls of energy that stops my love from getting in; it is like watching water splash off of a window pane, and I get wet from my own rain of love. So there I am pouring with love and sensitivity, wanting to grow closer with others, seeking to create a deep and meaningful connection and then relationship, but … not being able to. I wring my mind trying to figure this one out, and this is of course a part of that process. I create around myself the aura of seeking, wanting, desiring, and depending on your own perceptions and feelings can interpret me as desperate, needy, and creepy. I suspect that it could have to do with your own walls, your own fears and psychological need to remain safe and untouched. Freud was true when he started to identify all these psychological phenomena, like projection, denial, reaction formation, displacement, repression/suppression, sublimation and more. I see these things all around me and in me, and the energy they take up in our psychic space can in extreme cases create disorders, illnesses, and illusions for reality.
I am not sure that I want to be called single. It is a label, and I don’t like to use them, it is as offensive, I realize now, as being called boyfriend or husband. I know too that this is a radical stance, that our labels are used also for convenience, and communication to place our being in specific niches for clarity and sharing of life’s experiences, they create understanding among disconnected people. Like all things there is a payoff for using such labels, and I am not willing to make that exchange anymore. I don’t want to feel disconnected from my fellow people, I also don’t want to live under the rubric of these titles and labels that society holds. They create control and are the heart of what creates these walls and distances between us. I do want to move beyond the roles we fall into, to live without the controls of labels for people and communities. I know this all sounds absurd and dangerous, and all change is dangerous, and at first often seen as unnatural, queer and we avoid it in fear and let our doubts play upon our minds. It is time though for us to let go of the past. It has served us well, and we are in a great place of growth and potential now because of the efforts and achievements we have struggled for to this day. Now is the time to move on, to take new steps into a new territory of life, and start to open up to the feelings out there, to the reality that there is an entire existence of non-physical reality, that love is the ground and water and air that this new realm exists for. I believe that as we open up to love, many of life’s confusions will start to fade, many of life’s troubles will start to dissolve, and not only on a personal level; as this grows and multiplies society itself will start to change and become effected as the individual was at first. Change is painful, but as always worth the efforts to come to a healthy new understanding of where change is taking us.
I have said a lot today, and I am now coming to the end of what I want to say. Thank you for reading and listening to me. It is because of you all that I am even able to speak so boldly. I am starting to see this community of people who do seek change. I am starting to get involved with this community that does seek more open and loving relationships, people who understand love is a good thing, and that to control it is to control a good thing, which really does not make much sense. We are beings who naturally love, and to control what we do naturally is in reality un-natural, it is contrary to logic, intelligence and our growing understanding of the nature of our lives. I am glad to be starting to integrate myself into this community, and am grateful for their willingness to be open, to have meetings and parties and gatherings, to communicate on the internet, and to network for the purpose of spreading love and openness. It is the final perception of mine too, that allows me to put all of this together in a single whole. I can not live like this alone, it is too hard and I would be crushed under the selfish and manipulative energies that are out there. I come to this network of people with open arms, humbly accepting their presence, awareness, and open love that I so seek to express fully. I love openly and freely and am loved and am worthy of love, and I say that to you knowing that you understand and appreciate those words.
Truetalk is a contributing writer as well as a member of this online Community. He can be contacted here or through our message board Forums.
Truetalk ; November 15, 2006
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